Sometimes, they are not even buried.A couple of years ago, we found three plastic bags full of pheasant bodies dumped along local roads some days after a shoot. It is for outstanding contribution to British music by someone who’ll go down well on ITV That factor, I know, is always taken into consideration. And that rules out many of the more deserving candidates – though why the Brits committee and ITV think The Kinks wouldn’t have viewers singing along is beyond me.Outstanding contribution, lifetime achievement, call it what you will – such awards have got to start acknowledging genuine contribution and achievement, and not simply take into account current fashion. It is the Outstanding Contribution to Music award, the climax of the evening. This year’s winner was Bob Geldof; he, like Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Van Morrison and others before him, is clearly deserving of the accolade. Other past winners such as Duran Duran might divide opinion more.But I am more surprised by the names that have failed to be included over the awards’ 25-year history.
Ray Davies of The Kinks is one of the quintessential English songwriters of the past 100 years. Some would add that the crashing chords of the group’s first hit “You Really Got Me” invented heavy metal. Have The Kinks really made less of a contribution to British music than Duran Duran or other past winners such as Fleetwood Mac or Tom Jones?If this award was genuinely for influence on British music, then the distinctly non-household name Richard Thompson ought to be on the stage. A massive figure in British folk rock, a historian on disc of British popular music and a hero to two generations of musicians, he would never in a million years be considered for the award.The reason is that he isn’t prime-time telly. This important sounding award is not really for outstanding contribution to British music at all. “Make sure you’ve got your head a few centimetres from the pillow before you toke on this,” he warned me. “It’s that strong.” I did as I was told but all that happened was that my girlfriend’s face was transmogrified into a hideous vegetative tangle.
Rotten smoke indeed.Ralph Steadman doesn’t need to indulge in any artificial stimulants at all as you can see from his superb picture of “gunnera men”. He saw them at Leeds Castle the other week, high on Assam tea. I wonder sometimes if, like Obelix, Ralph was dropped in a vat of some potion when he was a child It may explain the tortured elasticity of his vision “Zwaar” as the Dutch would say
More from Will Self. It’s tempting to devote this space to querying how the Devon teenager Joss Stone won the urban music award at the Brits last Wednesday. But deconstructing the state of urban music on the mean streets of Paignton might cause the brain to implode. Naturally they turned out to be about as glamorous as a couple of c.1976 polytechnic students reciting Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch Yes, they’d got on the wrong end of their product.
The house had as well – every nook and cranny stank of skunk and there were about 50 kilos stacked up in Geest banana boxes. In order not to arouse the suspicions of any Dutch narcs who happened to be passing downwind, a ventilation system had been rigged up which continually passed the air through a bucket of bleach.The grower turned out to be a rather strait-laced young woman from Basingstoke, while the “taster” was an Austrian short-story writer manqu?He wanted to talk Hemingway – most tedious Before I left he handed me a bud the size of baby’s fist. “I’ve been up all night scraping four of your fellow countrymen off the central reservation of a Belgian motorway!” I couldn’t help but thrill to his flagrant lack of diplomacy.In truth, this nether Netherlands visit was a bit of a clich?I was writing a parody of a James Bond story and decided to set it among the dope-growing fraternity. The premise was simple: Bond falls for a lovely Dutch spy, but when he arrives in Holland to investigate the skunk business with her they share a joint and it triggers off his issues. He sees that his activities as a Lothario are simply the flip side of his misogyny. Packed off to boarding school at an early age he has never really understood women and, threatened by them, his priapic progress is nothing but his inability to deal with intimacy. Standing in the opulent Rotterdam hotel room, the gorgeous Dutch spy thrown naked across the silk counterpane in front of him, Bond experiences his first flop-on as his head whirls with disturbing images.
I called the story “Rotten Smoke”, from the lines in Shakespeare’s sonnet 34: “To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way / Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke …”In the interests of verisimilitude I’d arranged through a Dutch friend to meet up with some skunky operatives and learn about the intricacies of the business. The wacky tobacconists lived in a vertiginous old terraced house in the district of Amsterdam known – rather suitably – as “De Pijp” (The Pipe). The official sneered, “If only your Mr Major would ratify the EU Treaty these problems would, I think, not be happening!”I felt so implicated in Britishness that I misguidedly phoned “our” consul. His answering machine barked, “Don’t bother me with trivial problems like mislaid passports!” I left an ‘umble message to the effect that we were having problems entering the country, but don’t bother doing anything if it’s a hassle – and to our surprise he called back three minutes later. “What the bloody hell do you mean bothering me with this!” he screamed down the phone. That to me encapsulates the Dutch sense of humour: the pratfall is conceived of as ironic. It’s a form of Little Country Blues that’s oddly endearing.
In the Year of Three Trips, the last time I went by ferry from Margate to Zeebrugge, then drove through Belgium to Rotterdam.
